Cozy Up to a Kinder, Gentler Lincoln Center, and Cue the Credits

We find Richard Lacayo’s interview with Elizabeth Diller of Diller, Scofidio + Renfro about her firm’s Lincoln Center redesign funny — not intentionally so, there’s just something about bringing Lincoln Center “to the streets” that makes us giggle and hear that Doobie Brothers’ song in our head. Yes we laugh, but we also think it’s a good idea; we used to live on the opposite side of Central Park and waited many a night for the M66 while glazing over at the building’s rather unfriendly facade.

It has never been the kind of place you’d hang around just for the ambiance, unlike say, London’s Royal National Theatre.

Their exchange about the project’s goal to make the cultural hub fit in made us wonder: If Lincoln Center was a character in film, would the previous version have been one of those intelligent, potentially attractive, loner types — think Ally Sheedy in the Breakfast Club or Rachel Leigh Cook in She’s All That. Will the new and improved version — complete with a bar that’s open to the public, meaning now we can glaze over for better reasons — feel more accessible to the locals?

Or, to extend our rather silly teen flick metaphor, when Lincoln Center debuts stage one of their makeover this weekend (Yay for Alice Tully Hall!), will there be a happy ending for everyone involved? Will the misfit win the heart of the hard-to-please jock?